Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Glad we didn't get a lot of snow this year

Otherwise there's a chance my town could have used radioactive brine to melt the snow and ice. Like in West Virginia:

In West Virginia, for example, environmental regulators and highway officials last year announced plans for the state to start paying around five cents per gallon for gas drilling wastewater known as brine, which tends to be extremely salty, to melt ice on roads. They planned to buy about 1.2 million gallons at more than 120 sites around the state and to buy more as needed.

They know it might be radioactive, by the way, they just don't seem to think it's a big deal. West Virginia officials "said that only wastewater from shallow wells would be used, thereby reducing levels of radioactivity."

Lest you think this is just a winter-time problem, and hey, Global Warming will eliminate the danger, think again:

More than 155,000 gallons of this wastewater was sent by a drilling company called Ultra Resources to nine towns for dust suppression in 2009, state records show. The water came from two gas wells in Tioga County and contained radium at almost 700 times the levels allowed in drinking water.

“I was told nothing about frack water or any gas-well brines or anything else,” said Deborah Kotulka, the secretary of Richmond Township, in Tioga County, whose name appears on the state record. Her township received 101,640 gallons of the water from wells with high radioactivity, those records show.

So when the dust bowl hits, I for one will stand against it with my glow-in-the-dark squirt gun.